We shouldn’t parcel racism into discrete categories despite its unevenness. The conflation of anything undesirable with “Islam” has deep antecedents in U.S. slavery and colonization, but Middle Easterners and South Asians are capable of replicating earlier epochs of racism even as they suffer the consequences of its continued existence. To untangle these complexities, we have to extricate ourselves from notions of racism that elide the ruling class and its stooges. We’ll get nowhere if we reproduce the imperatives of people invested in our confusion.